ESXi 5.5 on Dell PowerEdge C6100

[exilpec]

I have seen many posts about this but I have not been able to find an answer on how to get the raid working...

I have set up the Raid in the bois as a raid 1 added the two drives, when in the installer I saw 2 hard drives. Strange so I rebooted, raid controller shows raid 2 two drives, ok maybe its seeing something funky. So installed ESXi 5.5 without issue, on reboot the raid controller shows a degraded array... I opened the raid controller and it asks to re-add drive 0... I say yes... now no data not a big deal... I have googled the hell out of how to set this up on a c6100 in a raid but no joy, ServeTheHome seems to have the most posts about the C6100. So I am tuning to you in hopes of finding a way to get raid 1 on this server so that I can start playing with VMware esxi 5.5...

 

[britinpdx]

If you are using the ICH10R chipset RAID feature (essentially a software RAID) then I think you are out of luck as ESXI doesn't support that. You are setting up the capability of RAID in the BIOS but the software (ESXI) doesn't have the driver to complete the job !

You would have to use an ESXI supported hardware RAID controller. A couple of paths that you could go down, either ..

(1) the C6100 specific LSI mezzanine cards. It's important to be aware of the cable routing issues on the C6100 sled, so if you go with the mezzanine card (p/n Y8Y69) make sure you get the cable harness specific to the job (p/n HYJ6G) and the bridge card (p/n JKM5M)

or

(2) a low profile PCI-e RAID controller. Several options here, and you can see from the following photo that you don't want a card with "end" connectors as cable routing would be difficult due to the CPU heatsink. You would want a card with "top" connectors such as this example which is an IBM M1015 with a 0.5m Monoprice SFF-8087 to SATA cable to connect to the interposer SATA ports. This is just an example of how I connected the hardware together, but I ran this under Windows not ESXI. I've never personally tested the IBM M1015 with ESXI so I can't confirm that it will work out of the box, it may need to be cross flashed to IR mode (see this STH main site post. )

 

[Patrick]

Exactly right. ICH10R RAID is not supported by ESXi. VMware only supports "real" RAID controllers.

 

[cw823]

I would recommend adjusting the heatsink plastic on the top cpu so you're not restricting airflow across your m1015. Just a thought

 

[britinpdx]

I don't have the node configured that way any more, so I can't test temps, but I wouldn't be so sure about adjusting the deflector.

Isn't the purpose of the deflector to get air over to the 5520 chipset, which is notoriously hot. In this configuration I may have actually compounded the issue by putting the Mellanox infiniband mezzanine card over the 5520, thus potentially further reducing airflow over the chipset.

Now, if we only knew someone with a C6100 and a FLIR imaging camera, we may be able to get a data point on this issue ....